Mum's the word on dad

For men to be better fathers, women have to loosen the parenting reins, according to Adrienne Burgess. She spoke to Bettina Arndt.

Ten years ago, when journalist Adrienne Burgess dreamt up a book on fatherhood as a timely idea to sell to her publisher, she never imagined it would lead her to become an international expert on fatherhood, to establish a British organisation promoting fathering and become an adviser to the Blair Government on policy issues.

Having left Australia for Britain as a university student, Burgess, 54, is back in her native country as keynote speaker at a fatherhood strategy conference being held today at Parliament House in Canberra.

She's excited to discover fatherhood is now very much on the agenda in Australia, with parliamentarians such as Mark Latham and Larry Anthony lining up to plan future policy with academics, researchers and people working with fathers across the country.

"My key message will be, it's time to let fathers in - to seriously support their close involvement with their children right from the earliest months. If we don't do that we're missing a huge opportunity, for mothers, children and fathers. This is the big gender project of the 21st century and it's going to have implications as great as the liberation of women," she says.

Burgess sees clear parallels to challenges once faced by the women's movement, given the enormous cultural and structural barriers to men's participation in family life.

"For men to become close to their children these will have to be taken as seriously and tackled as consciously as the dismantling of barriers to women's participation in the wider world," she says with her trademark passion.

"She's great at inspiring audiences to think in new ways about fatherhood," says Dr Richard Fletcher, from the Engaging Fathers project at Newcastle University. Burgess's background equips her well to using a lectern to spread the word. As the daughter of Dora Krummel, one of Australia's best known early speech and drama teachers, Burgess spent her teen years in Canberra winning drama and speaking competitions. "Mum's pupils always carried off the prizes," says Burgess.

By her 20s, she was successfully working as an actress in London, with lead parts in BBC series, including The Bill and the sci-fi hit Dr Who, film and theatre productions. Between acting jobs, she supported herself with a flourishing journalist career in women's magazines and newspapers, which started in the 1960s with a Sydney Morning Herald column. "It was published on the women's pages and called London Bird's Diary," Burgess says with a chuckle.

Her passion about fathers developed during three years researching what was to become her best-selling book Fatherhood Reclaimed _ The Making of the Modern Father (Random House).

Burgess was well connected to the team of strong feminists working to help Blair into government. Her best friend is Patricia Hewitt, now UK Trade and Industry Minister but also a former Canberra girl and daughter of the eminent bureaucrat Sir Lennox Hewitt. Her friends invited Burgess to write up the policy implications of her fatherhood work at the Institute for Public Policy Research, which was providing the policy framework for New Labour. By the time her book appeared, she had also produced policy papers on fatherhood and child support.

It was around this time that Burgess became a mother and had her first chance to observe the fathering process first hand. Her husband, Martin Cochrane, also a successful actor, has two children from a previous marriage and wasn't keen on a second family. Burgess pushed him into it. "I said, 'Let's have a child. I'll do everything and nothing will change'. He stared at me and said, 'You are mad, everything will change'. Of course he was right," says Burgess, adding that despite his reservations Cochrane ultimately became an involved and devoted father.

In part, this was due to a deliberate decision by Burgess to step back. "As I got more involved in the work on fatherhood, I became more aware there wasn't anything fathers couldn't do, except breastfeed - and I hadn't been great at that. It was all a matter of practice," she says, stressing the importance of letting fathers gain confidence by making their own mistakes.

Burgess points out that's how all mothers learn and mentions the occasion she embarked on a five-hour train trip with her infant daughter leaving behind in the fridge the four bottles of formula she'd prepared for the journey. She says mothers need to bite their tongues and permit their partners the same learning curve. "In the beginning I was always in there making him feel inadequate in the subtlest way, redoing something he'd done."

So the challenge of encouraging men to become more involved with their families requires women to relinquish some control over the dynamics of the family, says Burgess, acknowledging it isn't always easy to step aside. As someone once told her: "For a man to be the father he wants to be, a woman has to be less of the mother she wants to be."

This means confronting the assumption that mother knows best, that raising children is women's business - a basic premise that acts as a roadblock to pro-father initiatives. In 1998, Adrienne Burgess co-founded Fathers Direct, a charity set up with some funding from the British Government to become an information centre on fathers.

With the centre playing a key role in policy development and helping family services work with dads, some years ago Burgess found herself sitting on a research project advisory committee. The meeting was preparing a questionnaire to measure how much fathers did, or didn't do, with their teenagers. One question asked how often dads took their children to the doctor. "Dads don't do that very often but they do drive their kids to parties. Shall we put in a question on that?" she suggested.

"Huh! You'd just expect men to have all the fun, wouldn't you? Taking kids to parties!" sniffed a female researcher. Enraged Burgess explained she wasn't talking about going to parties but rather the "fun" of sitting freezing in a car at 2am waiting to drive youngsters home. "I get so angry at that type of attitude I just want to throw up," Burgess says.

This resistance from what she calls "old-style" feminists does present difficulties, acknowledges Burgess. "The feminist is very confused about children. On the one hand, they are seen as gold and jewels, women's main area of control and expertise. But on the other hand, they are seen as women's greatest burden," she says, adding that the notion of fathers as important to children is interpreted by some as offensive to single mothers and as undermining women's autonomy.

Just as much of a problem, according to Burgess, are some of the "Angry Dads" groups who "are not pro-fatherhood in a sense of re-visioning gender roles but think you're going to keep men close to their children by preventing mothers from leaving marriages - which of course is deeply oppressive of women".

Burgess is well aware of the destructive effects of divorce on many father-children relationships and wants far greater parenting time with both parents to become the norm when families split up. However, she is fiercely resistant to any notion of forcing people to stay in severely damaging relationships and to conservative agendas promoting policies that would restrict women's freedom. (Her latest book, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? [Random House], investigates when relationships are worth saving.)

Burgess has been fascinated by the recent debate inspired by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward arguing fathers should be denied equal time with children after divorce unless they shared childcare responsibilities during the marriage. Burgess wasn't surprised by the outrage that greeted Goward's remarks - Sydney 2BG radio personality Chris Smith reported a "melt-down" in response to Goward's comments, with men and women protesting that most Australian men are primary breadwinners because the couple sees this as in the family's best interests.

While Burgess is strongly opposed to punishing divorced breadwinners by denying them contact with children, her view is that the male bread-winning role has terrible effects on the child/father relationship and only by women earning as much as men and sharing the economic burden will men gain the more flexible work/caring arrangements they need.

Goward will also address this week's fathering strategy conference - a move Burgess sees as very appropriate, given that the Equal Opportunities Commission in the UK has played a key role in supporting the development of fathering policies.

Burgess is currently working with Professor Graeme Russell, Australia's best-known fatherhood academic, on a book chapter discussing the impact of government policies on fatherhood - looking at divorce and child support, tax and welfare policies, domestic violence education, employment, childcare, poverty, and health issues - the huge range of areas that can support or undermine men's relationships with their children. With many of these topics on the agenda at the Canberra conference, it is a promising start to the mighty job of letting fathers in.